John Wilder Tukey, one of the most influential statisticians of the
last 50 years and a wide-ranging thinker credited with inventing
the word "software," died on Wednesday in New Brunswick, N.J.
He was 85.

The cause was a heart attack after a short illness, said Phyllis
Anscombe, his sister-in-law.

Mr. Tukey developed important theories about how to analyze data
and compute series of numbers quickly. He spent decades as both a
professor at Princeton University and a researcher at AT&T's Bell
Laboratories, and his ideas continue to be a part of both doctoral
statistics courses and high school math classes. In 1973, President
Richard M. Nixon awarded him the National Medal of Science.

But Mr. Tukey frequently ventured outside of the academy as well,
working as a consultant to the government and corporations and
taking part in social debates.

In the 1950's, he criticized Alfred C. Kinsey's research on sexual
behavior. In the 1970's, he was chairman of a research committee that
warned that aerosol spray cans damaged the ozone layer. More
recently, he recommended that the 1990 Census be adjusted by using
statistical formulas in order to count poor urban residents whom he
believed it had missed.

"The best thing about being a statistician," Mr. Tukey once told a
colleague, "is that you get to play in everyone's backyard."

An intense man who liked to argue and was fond of helping other
researchers, Mr. Tukey was also an amateur linguist who made
significant contributions to the language of modern times. In a 1958
article in American Mathematical Monthly, he became the first
person to define the programs on which electronic calculators ran,
said Fred R. Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School who is editing a
book on the origin of terms. Three decades before the founding of
Microsoft, Mr. Tukey saw that "software," as he called it, was
gaining prominence. "Today," he wrote at the time, it is "at least as
important" as the " 'hardware' of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes
and the like."

Twelve years earlier, while working at Bell Laboratories, he had
coined the term "bit," an abbreviation of "binary digit" that described
the 1's and 0's that are the basis of computer programs.

Both words caught on, to the chagrin of some computer scientists
who saw Mr. Tukey as an outsider. "Not everyone was happy that
he was naming things in their field," said Steven M. Schultz, a
spokesman for Princeton.

Mr. Tukey had no immediate survivors. His wife of 48 years,
Elizabeth Rapp Tukey, an antiques appraiser and preservation
activist, died in 1998.

Mr. Tukey was born in 1915 in New Bedford, a fishing town on the
southern coast of Massachusetts, and was the only child of Ralph H.
Tukey and Adah Tasker Tukey. His mother was the valedictorian of
the class of 1898 at Bates College in Lewiston, Me., and her closest
competition was her eventual husband, who became the salutatorian.
Classmates referred to them as the couple most likely to give birth to
a genius, said Marc G. Glass, a Bates spokesman.

The elder Mr. Tukey became a Latin teacher at New Bedford's high
school, but, because of a rule barring spouses from teaching at the
school, Mrs. Tukey was a private tutor, Mrs. Anscombe said. Mrs.
Tukey's main pupil became her son, who attended regular classes
only for special subjects like French. "They were afraid that if he
went to school, he'd get lazy," said Howard Wainer, a friend and
former student of John Tukey's.

In 1936, Mr. Tukey graduated from nearby Brown University with a
bachelor's degree in chemistry, and in the next three years earned
three graduate degrees, one in chemistry at Brown and two in
mathematics at Princeton, where he would spend the rest of his
career. At the age of 35, he became a full professor, and in 1965 he
became the founding chairman of Princeton's statistics department.

Mr. Tukey worked for the United States government during World
War II. Friends said he did not discuss the details of his projects, but
Mrs. Anscombe said he helped design the U-2 spy plane.

In later years, much of his important work came in a field that
statisticians call robust analysis, which allows researchers to devise
credible conclusions even when the data with which they are
working are flawed. In 1970, Mr. Tukey published "Exploratory Data
Analysis," which gave mathematicians new ways to analyze and
present data clearly.

One of those tools, the stem-and-leaf display, continues to be part of
many high school curriculums. Using it, students arrange a series of
data points in a series of simple rows and columns and can then
make judgments about what techniques, like calculating the average
or median, would allow them to analyze the information
intelligently.

That display was typical of Mr. Tukey's belief that mathematicians,
professional or amateur, should often start with their data and then
look for a theorem, rather than vice versa, said Mr. Wainer, who is
now the principal research scientist at the Educational Testing
Service.

"He legitimized that, because he wasn't doing it because he wasn't
good at math," Mr. Wainer said. "He was doing it because it was the
right thing to do."

Along with another scientist, James Cooley, Mr. Tukey also
developed the Fast Fourier Transform, an algorithm with wide
application to the physical sciences. It helps astronomers, for
example, determine the spectrum of light coming from a star more
quickly than previously possible.

As his career progressed, he also became a hub for other scientists.
He was part of a group of Princeton professors that gathered
regularly and included Lyman Spitzer Jr., who inspired the Hubble
Space Telescope. Mr. Tukey also persuaded a group of the nation's
top statisticians to spend a year at Princeton in the early 1970's
working together on robust analysis problems, said David C.
Hoaglin, a former student of Mr. Tukey.

Mr. Tukey was a consultant to the Educational Testing Service, the
Xerox Corporation and Merck & Company. From 1960 to 1980, he
helped design the polls that the NBC television network used to
predict and analyze elections.

His first brush with publicity came in 1950, when the National
Research Council appointed him to a committee to evaluate the
Kinsey Report, which shocked many Americans by describing the
country's sexual habits as far more diverse than had been thought.
From their first meeting, when Mr. Kinsey told Mr. Tukey to stop
singing a Gilbert and Sullivan tune aloud while working, the two
men clashed, according to "Alfred C. Kinsey," a biography by James
H. Jones.

In a series of meetings over two years, Mr. Kinsey vigorously
defended his work, which Mr. Tukey believed was seriously flawed,
relying on a sample of people who knew each other. Mr. Tukey said
a random selection of three people would have been better than a
group of 300 chosen by Mr. Kinsey.

I am happy to announce that my new book "Spectral Methods
in MATLAB" is now available from SIAM (http://www.siam.org).
I had great fun writing this book, which is built around
forty M-files whose average length is 3.6 inches. For more
information, or to download files p1.m, p2.m,..., p40.m
and give them a try, follow the link from
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/nick.trefethen/.

Dear members of this list:
I am working with the mathematical modelling of polymerization chemical
reactions. Presently we have derived a given mathematical model (in terms of
a set of stiff nonlinear ordinary differential equations) and
measured a set of experimental data. We would like to adjust a set of
kinetic parameters to our model using the experimental information. I wonder
if some of you might recomend me a Matlab program to make nonlinear
parameter fitting when models are written in terms of ODEs;
if you know a fortran code it might be helpful too.
thanks in advance for you kind help.

We now have Java-based Submission Tool which connects to the NEOS
Server through TCP/IP sockets. This tool provides Windows and Unix
users with rapid access to the Server and allows submission forms to
be saved for repeated use.

http://www-neos.mcs.anl.gov/neos/server-submit.html

*** NEOS Server 3.0 package ***

You can now download the software behind the Server!
While the NEOS Server does not provide downloads of any solver
software, the NEOS Server 3.0 package provides a ready-made Application =
Service Provider. Your own applications can be brought on-line through
NEOS without the pain of creating from scratch such necessities as user
interfaces, submission parsing and scheduling software, or the
communications handling necessary to run jobs on remote systems.

http://www-neos.mcs.anl.gov/neos/server-downloads.html

***

To learn more about recent developments in the NEOS Server, visit

http://www-neos.mcs.anl.gov/

Liz Dolan and Jorge More' for the NEOS Group.

The NEOS Server is a project of the Optimization Technology Center,
jointly managed by Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University.

Special Issue of Linear Algebra and Its Applications
ACCURATE SOLUTION OF EIGENVALUE PROBLEMS II

In the last several years, there have been a number of advances in the
accurate solution of eigenvalue problems. Many of the results have come from
the realization that eigenvalue algorithms that exploit the structure of the
problem can lead to more accurate eigenvalue and eigenvector computations.
Well known examples include faster and more accurate methods for solving the
symmetric tridiagonal eigenproblem, more accurate methods for computing the
singular value decompostion, and further understanding of the conditioning
theory for the non--symmetric eigenvalue problem.

To recognize these advances and to encourage further advances, we are
proposing to have a special issue of Linear Algebra and Its Applications on
Accurate Solution of Eigenvalue Problems. This is the second such special
issue. The first was volume 309 of Linear Algebra and Its Applications,
published in early 2000.

This special issue is in coordination with the International Workshop on Accurate Solution of Eigenvalue Problems III held in Hagen, Germany on
July 3-6,2000. The participants in the workshop have been strongly encouraged
to submit papers to the special issue. Submissions are alsowelcome from
non-participants as long as they are consistent with the themes of
the workshop.

The editors for this special issue will be

Jesse L. Barlow
Department of Computer Science
and Engineering
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16802--6106
USA

Please submit three (3) copies of your manuscript to the editor of your
choice. However, if another editor is deemed more qualified to handle your
manuscript, it may be forwarded to that editor. Manuscripts submitted to
this special issue will be refereed according to standard procedures for
Linear Algebra and Its Applications.

All papers for this special issue should be postmarked by February 1, 2001.

International Workshop on Parallel matrix algorithms
and applications, 18-19 August 2000, Neuchatel, Switzerland

The scientific programme of the above workshop is now on line.
You can find information about the programme, tutorials
registration, publication and accommodation at the following URL:
http://iiun.unine.ch/Research/matrix/seminars/pmaa2000

The Fourth Annual High Performance Fortran User Group (`HUG') meeting will
be held on October 19-20, 2000 at Hotel Intercontinental Tokyo Bay,
Tokyo, Japan. This meeting follows the first three meetings in the series
held in 1997 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, in 1998 in Porto, Portugal,
and 1999 in Redondo Beach, California, USA.

It provides an opportunity for users of HPF to meet each other, share
ideas and experiences, and obtain up-to-date information on current HPF
implementations and future plans.

Prior to the HUG meeting, the third International Symposium on High
Performance Computing (ISHPC2K) will take place also in Tokyo in
October 16-18, 2000.
http://alice.ics.nara-wu.ac.jp/ishpc2k/

International Workshop on OpenMP: Experiences and Implementations
(WOMPEI) will be held as a part of ISHPC2K.
http://www.ac.upc.es/wompei (European site)
http://www.oscar.elec.waseda.ac.jp/wompei.html (Asian site)

Call for submissions

We invite abstracts for presentations from all those working on topics of
relevance for High Performance Fortran. Relevant subject areas include,
but are not limited to:

Abstracts of up to 500 words must be submitted electronically by July 31,
2000 to hug2000@tokyo.rist.or.jp. They must be in HTML format
readable by Netscape 2.0 or later. Authors will be notified of
acceptance by August 23, 2000.
The selected abstracts will be posted on the Web prior to the conference.
Proceedings will be distributed at the meeting.

Important dates
July 31, 2000: deadline for submission of abstracts
August 23, 2000: notification of acceptance
September 22, 2000: deadline for camera ready manuscripts

The John-von-Neumann Distinguished Visiting Professorships have been
established in 1999 through an award by the "Stifterverband fuer die
Deutsche Wissenschaft".

The aim of this visiting professorship program is to foster international
connections and cooperations between distinguished researchers and the faculty
and students of Mathematics at the Munich University of Technology
(www.ma.tum.de). This award is endowed with a grant of up to 75000 DM (which
can be supplemented by sabbatical funds) to support a half year or a full year
stay at our department. The John-von-Neumann Distinguished Visiting Professor
will have to deliver the John-von-Neumann Lectures (4 hours per week for one
semester or 2 hours per week for two semesters).

The John-von-Neumann Lectures are given within the framework of the English
section of our graduate program. Hence excellent English proficiency is
required; native English speakers will be given preference.

Munich University of Technology is an equal opportunity employer and
particularly encourages applications of women.

Please, send applications including CV, list of publications, 3 letters of
recommendation, a short description of research projects and a list of
possible topics for the John-von-Neumann Lectures to

The Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE)
is seeking one or more Postdoctoral staff scientists to conduct research
in the area of guidance and controls. Individuals with a good general
background in guidance, controls, and dynamics of flight systems are
being sought.

The appointee will work in close cooperation with one or more of the
following
programs -- Space Transportation Technology, Risk-Based Design, Biomimetic
Flight, Aviation Safety/Control and Upset Prevention and Recovery sub
element.

Synthesis, and stability and performance analysis of feedback schemes for
control of nonlinear systems, and optimal control theory. Areas of interest
also include numerical techniques, and formal treatment of uncertainties and
randomly distributed model features;

Design and simulation of dynamic multi-agent autonomous systems. Research
includes development of analysis methods and design tools for control of
multi-agent systems, and their verification through large-scale simulation;

Dynamics and control of stochastic aerospace systems, with a strong
background in stochastic system theory, as well as modern and robust control
theory.

* Knowledge of the following application areas is useful:

Flight systems dynamics
Aerodynamics and structural mechanics

* Solid understanding of software design and numerical techniques

* Strong communication and teamwork skills

Postdoctoral staff scientist appointments are usually made for two years, with
the possibility of a third-year extension. ICASE is a non-profit research
organization located at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia,
USA. The Institute offers excellent opportunities to researchers for
collaboration with other scientists and engineers on problems of interest to
NASA. ICASE is a non-profit, equal opportunity employer.

General information about ICASE and its research programs is available via the
World Wide Web at http://www.icase.edu
Please send resume, contact information for three professional references,
and a brief letter proposal (three pages maximum) that contains a statement
of research interests, expected contributions to NASA=92s efforts, and
availability.

Candidates are sought for the position of Postdoctoral Research Associate
at the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. The position will involve
the development of novel algorithms and software for sensitivity and
interval analysis of differential-algebraic equations (DAEs). The task will
involve close collaboration with other researchers participating in the
DAEPACK project a MIT (http://yoric.mit.edu/daepack/daepack.html), and with
colleagues in industry and at national laboratories.

Candidates should have a Ph.D. in computational science or engineering, or
closely related science or engineering discipline. Please send a curriculum
vitae plus a list of a least three referees to: